Alpha One - Chris Burton [29]
He flew his yacht directly from the AFP summit on Telgaron just two days ago and landed on the water in front of his villa. The summit was interesting for the first twenty-four hours before the conversation inevitably turned to Alpha Fleet and to their divorcing themselves from ECG. This came as a surprise to Roslyn, as his cabinet colleagues assured him Alpha’s senior Admirals were not ready to make such a huge commitment. Clearly this was not the case, and to make matters worse, Admiral Koenig was elected as CIC—totally unopposed.
The government would challenge the legality of the move. This was political expediency. It was however highly unlikely that they would be successful, and there was a certain inevitability about it all, even if the speed of the events took everyone by surprise.
Alpha took this action following Roslyn’s refusal to provide further funding. This was the start of his new leadership ethos, which simply told his government colleagues, his friends, family and his enemies he meant business and would not be broken by anyone. Why should he? His status and term as leader of ECG could not change, but Roslyn wanted to be seen historically as a great leader following his ten year term of office. His current popularity and that of his party was not clear, especially following Alpha’s unilateral decision to divorce itself from ECG. If he didn’t act, he could be perceived as being a weak President. He needed to come up with a strategy to pull back some of his government’s influence over Alpha. Roslyn worked through his mind the makings of a solid and workable policy to achieve just that.
He already started the process. Initially he made representations to the main power brokers at AFP: he told them he felt it was unreasonable for his government to still be funding Alpha in the light of AFP’s funding to Alpha. His stance here was simple. ECG would reduce their ‘voluntary’ contributions to AFP’s central purse if the new funding commitments were allowed to continue. This was not met favorably, but his government could do as they wished and it might yet prove a popular strategy politically.
As he stood watching the moonlight shimmer across the lake, the second part of his strategy took shape. Alpha may control the space ports on Earth and its surrounding colonies, but his government controlled the shield systems. He could control Alpha’s movements within the Earth’s territorial boundaries by limiting shield clearance. They would control departures and lease clearance facilities for Alpha and other commercial ventures. Alpha would reduce funding and have to bear costs to clear each planets shield systems.
This is brilliant, he told himself. He would work on the logistics and wording of his next speech to congress tomorrow. How long would it be before Koenig came knocking on his door, desperate for a return to the old ways?
Chapter Fifteen
Top Gun Preliminary Trials
The ‘Top Gun’ or ‘Top Gun’ tournament, as it became known, was pseudo-military slang for the ‘Alpha combined jump ship command trials ’. ‘Top Gun’ was an historical term for a competition between US Navy Pilots vying for the top prize in piloting of military attack aircraft in the late Twentieth Century. Although the term and the practice were lost in time, the name ended up being applied to Alpha, and it stuck. Even Alpha used the term together with the official title in its event literature. The trials took place yearly and were open to all Academy final-year students. Each of the fifty-plus Alpha Academies would send two pilots to the trial finals based on Titus 3, and the outright winner was termed ‘Top Gun’ with the college to which he or she attended termed ‘Top Gun